It was said that at one point earth was flat. Neda guessed that earth would stay flat in the grave for her father, with all the good or bad that he had done in his life. When she was a little girl, she hated the days that her father was not in a good mood; the days that Sohrab and she hid from him; and she loved his good days when he always wanted her at his side, compared her to himself for the love of poetry, and encouraged her to write. Those occasions, he was in his best attribute. She did not know then about double personality; but she knew it now. She realized suddenly that all the things that happened to her and all in the family were perhaps the result of her father's double personality. The man had no fault of his own. She recalled the last thing the old doctor told her in the hospital before she finally left:
"Don't be hard on the dead man! He had something wrong with his head!" She recalled that she had heard the same exact thing from the doctor a while back when she had visited him to quiz him about her daughter and how they had been able to change legal documents. That was the time that she studied about these kinds of psychological diseases. In fact she bought a book and read it twice from cover to cover.
The thought about her father that perhaps had some kind of illness in his head made her finally cry. She thought about the moments of his life, when he was young, when he was a boy, when he had become a father for the first time. Where was his boyhood house? Neda never knew her grandparents from father side that well. Somehow they were not connected or important like her grandparents from mother side! And then one day she heard that they were no more. She remembered that it was a small funeral; only father and mother went. They said that they both died in a car accident. However as young as she was, she had eavesdropped and heard the words suicide, murder. After their funeral, no body ever talked about them. Neda was only eleven years old.
Did her father know that he was dead? Did he know that he would be buried with a crushing retrospect? Would it be the customary funeral of days and days of mourning? She did not want that kind of noise to touch her!
There was a time that she loved God with passion. In her present situation, she feared him with the same kind of emotion.
She was still in the shower, letting the warm water flow over her aching body, and thinking all these. She heard Kasra knocking the door:
"Are you okay in there? It's been a long time you've been there!"
Neda, almost angry of being disturbed, said: "yes, I'm fine. What do you want?"
"You need to get ready and go. They keep calling for you. They all are expecting you to be there."
She closed the water. Duty before emotion, she thought to herself, before stepping out of the shower.
"What a long shower!" Kasra said while wrapping a big and warm towel around her. She let him to dry her out, to dry her long hair, one of her most beautiful attribute, with a smaller towel. She was too tired and too achy to do anything for herself. Kasra had all she needed laid on the bed for her. He had already done the bed from her short, disturbed, and disheartened sleep. There were a two piece, black skirt suit, a black shell so she could wear it under the jacket, black stockings and even a black, chiffon scarf were laid on the bed.
"Oh, Kasra, what would I do without you?" She murmured, but he heard it.
"Look at you, eight days without sleeping, perhaps eating junk! Look at you, you look so tired, so thin!" He was kind and genuine as always.
She was tired, so much so that she did not remember ever to be that way. By the time she got to her father's home, it was one o'clock in the afternoon. Everybody was there. In fact more than the immediate family, aunts, uncles, neighbors, friends... She had not seen them for many years.
To Be Continued
No comments:
Post a Comment